Broken and scorched black by fire, the dense, wedge-shaped marks etched into the ancient clay tablets are only just visible under the soft light at the British Museum. These tiny signs are the remains of the world's oldest writing system: cuneiform. Developed more than 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where modern-day Iraq now lies, cuneiform captured life in a complex and fascinating civilisation for some three millennia. From furious letters between warring royal siblings to rituals for soothing a fractious baby, the tablets offer a unique insight into a society at the dawn of history. An estimated half a million of them have been excavated, and more are still buried in the ground.

Although cuneiform passed to other Mesopotamian cultures, which refined and altered it to suit their own languages and dialects, knowledge of how to read and write the various cuneiform scripts was gradually lost to time. In the 19th century, translators managed to decipher the writing system; and in 1872 the Assyriologist George Smith translated the most famous example of cuneiform, the Epic of Gilgamesh, a 4000-year-old poem widely believed to be the earliest surviving great work of literature. Unfortunately, translation of cuneiform tablets is still a time-consuming process and there are very few modern scholars who are able to decipher them. Sumerian is what is known as a "language isolate", one that has no genealogical relationship to any other language spoken today. But modern technology has given researchers new hope of unravelling the script imprinted on the roughly 300,000 cuneiform tablets discovered to date, of which only around 10% have been translated so far.